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The rocket was out, but the smoke in the lobby still flickered, glowing an unearthly jade hue.

Maggie charged after him, beyond thought now, rattled and angry and afraid. The boy couldn’t escape through the front door—that was locked from the outside with a chain—but there was a fire door in the reading room that the bums kept propped open. Beyond was the eastern parking lot. She could catch him there. She didn’t know what she’d do with him when she had her hands on him, and a part of her was scared to find out. As she hit the reading room, she saw the door to the outside already settling shut.

“You shit,” she whispered. “You shit.”

She slammed through the door and out into the parking lot. Across the paved expanse, a single functioning streetlamp cast a nimbus of light. The center of the lot was brightly lit, but the edges were in darkness. The boy waited beside the lamppost. Little bastard had another sparkler going and was standing not far from a Dumpster filled with books.

“Are you out of your goshdarn mind?” Maggie said.

The boy shouted, “I see you through my magic window!” He drew a burning hoop in the air, at the level of his face. “Now your head is burning!”

“You st-st-start a fire in there and someone could get killed, you little *!” Maggie said. “Like you!”

She was short of breath and trembling, and her extremities prickled strangely. She clutched her Scrabble bag in one sweat-damp hand. She began stalking across the lot. Behind her the fire door clicked shut. Goddamn it. The kid had kicked away the stone that kept it from locking. She’d need to go all the way around the building to get back inside now.

“Look!” the child cried. “Look! I can write in flames!”

He slashed the tip of the sparkler in the air, a white spoke of light so intense it left a glowing afterimage on Maggie’s optic nerve, creating the illusion of pulsing letters in the air.

R

U

N

“Who are you?” she asked, swaying a little herself, catching in place halfway across the lot—not sure she had just seen what she thought she’d seen. That he had spelled what she thought he’d spelled.

“Look! I can make a snowflake! I can make Christmas in July!” And he drew a snowflake in the air.

Her arms bristled with gooseflesh.

“Wayne?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Wayne,” she said. “Oh, God.”

A pair of headlights snapped on in the shadows beyond the Dumpster, off to her right. A car idled along the curb, an old car with close-set headlamps, so black she had not seen it in the greater darkness around it.

“Hello!” called a voice from somewhere behind those headlights. He was on the passenger side of the car—no, wait, the driver’s side; it was all reversed on a British car. “What a night to go driving! Come on over, Ms. Margaret Leigh! It is Margaret Leigh, isn’t it? You look just like your photograph in the paper!”

Maggie squinted into the headlights. She was telling herself to move, get out of the middle of the parking lot, but her legs were stuck in place. The fire door was an impossible distance away, twelve steps that might as well have been twelve hundred, and anyway, she had heard it clap shut behind her.

It occurred to her that there was, at best, a minute or so left to her life. She asked herself if she was ready for it. Thoughts darted like sparrows racing in the dusk just when she most desperately wanted her mind to be still.

He doesn’t know Vic is here, she thought.

And: Get the boy. Get the boy and get him away.

And: Why doesn’t Wayne just run?

Because he couldn’t anymore. Because he didn’t know he was supposed to. Or he knew but couldn’t act on it.

But he had tried to tell her to run, had written it in flame, on the darkness. Had maybe even been trying, in his garbled way, to warn her in the library.

“Mr. Manx?” Maggie called, still unable to move her feet.

“You have been looking for me all your life, Ms. Leigh!” he shouted. “Well! Here I am at last! I am sure you have lots of questions for me. I know I have lots of questions for you! Come sit with us. Come have an ear of corn!”

“Let the b-b-b-b—” Maggie began, then choked up, couldn’t force it out, her tongue as helpless as her legs. She wanted to say, Let the boy go, but her stammer wouldn’t let her have that.

“C-c-cat got your t-t-tongue?” Manx shouted.

“Fuck you,” she said. There. That came out clean and clear. And f had always been one of her toughest letters.

“Get over here, you scrawny bitch,” Charlie Manx said. “Get in the car. Either you’re riding with us or we’re riding over you. Last chance.”

She breathed deeply and smelled waterlogged books, the perfume of rotting cardboard and paper that had dried beneath the furnace of the July sun. If a single breath could summarize an entire life, she supposed that would do. It was almost time.

It came to her then that she had nothing left to say to Manx. She had said it all. She turned her head and fixed her gaze on Wayne.

“You have to run, Wayne! Run and hide!”

His sparkler had gone out. A grimy smoke trickled away from it.

“Why would I do that?” he said. “.sorry I’m” He coughed. His frail shoulders jumped. “We’re going to Christmasland tonight! It’s going to be fun! .sorry so I’m” He coughed again, then shrieked, “How about you run instead! That would be a fun game! !myself to on hold can’t I”